California, don't throw money at the DMV's problems

A line of people waiting in Los Angeles for help at a California Department of Motor Vehicles Office stretched around the building at the South L.A. location on Tuesday, Aug. 7, 2018.

A line of people waiting in Los Angeles for help at a California Department of Motor Vehicles Office stretched around the building at the South L.A. location on Tuesday, Aug. 7, 2018. (Kent Nishimura/Los Angeles Times)

As savvy managers at large organizations know, throwing money at problems without first trying to understand why the problems are happening is a problem in and of itself. When things go wrong, frustration can lead managers to get impatient and seek a quick fix. This often wastes time and money.

Thankfully, new Gov. Gavin Newsom is showing an understanding of this concept and an aversion to waste. When he took office four weeks ago, he inherited a request from the state Department of Motor Vehicles for an additional $40.4 million to process federal Real IDs, which Californians will need to board planes beginning in October 2020. Even though the DMV had more than a decade to prepare for this new responsibility, it was so overwhelmed by the task that it experienced a nearly 50 percent increase in wait times at agency bureaus last summer.

Now Newsom has tabled the DMV’s funding request. He wants to see the report of the DMV Reinvention Strike Team he created to lead a “comprehensive modernization” of the agency as well as the preliminary version of a DMV audit that the Finance Department is expected to release next month. Both the strike team and the audit will also address the DMV’s other 2018 fiasco — its botched handling of at least 23,000 “motor voter” registrations.

After Gov. Jerry Brown’s inexplicable passivity in responding to the DMV’s nightmares — including initially opposing a state audit — Newsom’s approach is refreshing. We’ll have to wait to see if a much better DMV eventually emerges. But when it comes to the DMV, Californians are used to waiting.